Because of my son’s last cross country meet on Sunday, I missed my regularly scheduled religious pontificating. So I will make up for it by a quick reaction to something Bryan Caplan posted over at EconLog.

First, Caplan quotes from a Pew Forum poll which shows some pretty abysmal performances from self-identified religious Americans. (The example that bothered me the most, was that 53% of Protestants couldn’t identify Martin Luther as the person who inspired the Reformation.) OK that’s embarrassing, but I also would be embarrassed by what self-described “believers in the free market” had to say about economic theory.

Then Caplan goes in for the kill:

Now consider: If people sincerely believed that their eternal fates hinged on their knowledge of religion, their ignorance wouldn’t be rational. If you could save your soul with 40 hours of your time, you’d be mad to watch t.v. instead. Unfortunately for religious believers, this leaves them with two unpalatable options:

1. Option #1: Deep-down, most religious believers believe that death is the end. (This is consistent with the fact that even the pious mourn their loved ones at funerals, instead of celebrating the good fortune of the deceased). Even if this covert atheism is mistaken, the idea that most of the people in church aren’t true believers seems threatening.

2. Option #2: Most religious believers are so stupid and/or impulsive that they’ll knowingly give up eternal bliss for trivial mortal pleasures. But why then do so many believers show intelligence and self-control in other areas of life?

My question for Bryan: Has there ever been a major religion in the history of the world that taught “you could save your soul with 40 hours of your time”, in the way Bryan means in the quote above? I can’t think of any (but that might just be my rational ignorance).

If not, then isn’t it a rather poor premise, upon which Bryan leaps to the alternative that religious people are either liars or stupid?

Last point: I have said this before, I think when dealing with Steve Landsburg’s recent book. For some reason, really intelligent atheists who are extremely open-minded–people who would bend over backwards to be fair to Keynesians and Marxists when evaluating their arguments–don’t seem to think it’s necessary to be careful when evaluating what is obviously the single most important question of human existence. I’m not saying they’re stupid, just incredibly overconfident.

OK kids, back to secular matters. We will return to our economic discussions, until Sunday.

9 Responses to “Caplan’s Anti-Religious Non Sequitur”

I missed your regularly scheduled religious pontificating too. I saw this Caplan post, and was surprised and embarrassed myself. It is important to look at the Pew report, as “religious knowledge” means a general knowledge of all world religions, not specific knowledge of one’s own religion. I’m a Christian and I have to admit I know very little about Hinduism, for example. But yeah, some of that stuff was embarrassing.

1. Option #1: Deep-down, most religious believers believe that death is the end. (This is consistent with the fact that even the pious mourn their loved ones at funerals, instead of celebrating the good fortune of the deceased). Even if this covert atheism is mistaken, the idea that most of the people in church aren’t true believers seems threatening.

This argument is weak. Mourning of lost loved ones is, IMO, derived from PERSONAL feelings of loss, not, in general, any sympathy for the death of the loved one. A common rationalization of comfort is the claim that the person is in a better place.

My question for Bryan: Has there ever been a major religion in the history of the world that taught “you could save your soul with 40 hours of your time”, in the way Bryan means in the quote above?

I think you’ve missed the point.

If I believe my eternal fate depends on having the right religion, then I am certainly going to make a major investment in making sure I’ve got the *right* religion. And the first step in that direction is finding out what my currently professed religion claims is true.

No individual religion has to preach that 40 hours of my time can save my soul in order for 40 houirs of my time to be an extremely valuable investment in finding the right religion.

Yeah, I get that, Steve. But I’m saying (a) strictly speaking, the way Bryan worded his “gotcha!” doesn’t work, and (b) if we look at what is actually happening with religious people, then there still is no problem. So either way, I don’t see what the hypocrisy/stupidity is.

Take your starting premise: “If I believe my eternal fate depends on having the right religion…”

You are making it sound as if some people first decide, “OK, I have a soul and I believe there is life beyond the grave. Now I wonder what I have to do to ensure that I spend it in bliss?” whereas other people decide, “I don’t believe in the afterlife.” And so then the 2nd group isn’t being inconsistent by choosing to watch TV, rather than studying world religions.

But I don’t think that’s how it works, at least not for the Christians I know. They decide they trust Jesus (and the Bible etc.) and then that’s how they get their information about God etc.

Now you can say that’s a circular argument, or at least an arational (not irrational) one. Fair enough. But it’s not susceptible to Bryan’s critique.

To put it succinctly, Protestants aren’t in any way contradicting themselves by saying they believe Jesus is the path to salvation, and that they don’t think it’s necessary to study church history in order to get into heaven.

In fact, it would be a contradiction if a person DID call himself a born-again Christian, and claimed you needed to know the biography of Martin Luther if you valued your soul.

To repeat what I originally said in the post, I am not making excuses for the ignorance of the self-identified religious. It embarrasses me. But Americans in general embarrass me, or other groups of which I’m a part.

I for one think that Caplan’s questions were quite good and deserve intelligent and doctrinal responses. Some of his aside statements along with the option #2 blanketing of religious believers as “stupid” were provocative, but I’m sure that is exactly what Bryan had in mind.

These secular discussions of theology are actually quite healthy in my view, and it gives believers the forum to intelligently defend their beliefs, and question them if necessary. These are indeed hard questions, but believers should engage them intelligently, and not simply become frustrated and angry that they are asked by intelligent non-believers.

The results of the poll should not really be that shocking. Evangelicals and Mormons scored higher on Bible knowledge questions than Catholics of whatever demographic. Not really surprising given the doctrinal position of the Catholic Church and the necessity of the priest as mediator versus Protestant teaching and the Mormons missionary position (no pun intended). I think the most interesting conclusion is the relative depth and breadth of knowledge of all religions by atheists. Clearly, there is a spiritual component to life that either a) causes people like atheists to pursue that dimension of their lives or b) causes atheists to debunk the answers offered by all religions. My guess is that b is the more widely prevalent answer but I think Sam Harris and others argue effectively for the first answer.

Evangelicals answer about 7 out of 12 questions correctly. What would be an acceptable level of knowledge? I think it is telling that there is a general level of ignorance about one’s “beliefs” – I put that in scare quotes because if you don’t know it do you believe it? Maybe the better explanation is that religion is adaptive and we embrace what is needed at a certain time in the development of civilization or in our own personal development. For example, our opinions may change with regard to homosexuality, which the Bible condemns as wrong and which we may believe, – until your child comes out of the closet. Point being, beliefs may suit a purpose in certain times and places but not in others and as we grow and develop individually and societally, and as circumstances change we may discard the useless trivia of religious practice.

The problem with the survey is that is measured trivia. People know what is important and useful to them. Much of what the survey measured is not important to religious people. I can guarantee you that there are things about their religion that religious people know and consider important that atheists don’t know.

And this ties in with Caplan’s love of calling people irrational. Voters are not irrational, as his book suggests; he merely uses a different definition of rationality than is common. Voters do not have the time or the desire to investigate every issue for themselves so they do the rational thing: they exercise division of labor and rely on authorities they trust to do the work for them who have the training, experience and time to do it. Unfortunately, many of those experts are socialists. And they do the same thing in religion. No one has the time to do the work of a PhD theologian. It’s simply impossible for every person in the pews to do that kind of research. So people in the pews do the rational thing and rely on the experts to tell them what they need to know.

And keep in mind that the differences were all well within the margin of error, so why does anyone assert that there were significant differences?